Dr Kawashima’s Brain Training
The original and in many ways still the best, Dr Kawashima’s devised countless puzzles and challenges, based mostly on maths, reasoning and games with letters. The diverting effect is somewhere between Sudoku and the cryptic crossword. And while it doesn’t actually make you smarter, it really does keep you on your intellectual toes.
There are four games and soon there will be two films based on the adventures of puzzle-mad Professor Hershel Layton. In each town they visit, Prof Layton and his companion Luke find they’re set ever more fiendish challenges. Quirkier than Brain Training, the mental exercise here is cunningly accompanied with good gameplay, too.
Reminiscent of the world of MC Escher, this game uses a rotatable world where everything depends on perspective – so you have to work out whether the mannequin character that you’re controlling is going to wander off the edge of the universe, or is in fact just going upstairs.
Rescuing a princess is not a radical new twist for gaming. But in fact, Braid is a series of exercises in manipulating time; that means there’s a real puzzle to be solved. At times, it’s genuinely mind-bening as you try to work out how to complete its jigsaw.
Body and Brain Exercises
The Kinect accessory for Xbox is opening a genuinely new frontier for gaming: it’s a camera that turns your body into a gaming controller. This title uses it to provide a novel spin on Dr Kawashima’s Brain Training. Despite the terrible tag of “mathercise”, it allows players to combine reasoning and mathematical challenges with a physical element: so it’s mental arithmetic where you have to wave your arms to indicate the answer.